No preset path and many choices. Recovery is a journey.
Binge Eating and Eating Disorder Recovery Time
How long will binge eating and eating disorder recovery take? This is a reasonable question. The answer depends on how much dedication you and your therapist give to your recovery journey. Not only can I not provide a specific time, but I can't guarantee that someone will indeed recover. The answer so many people want is "Fast, inexpensive, and no suffering." Or "A short stay in an eating disorder residential program."
The question is complex with a different answer for every individual. If you are still reading after this undesirable news, please let me talk a little about what it takes to recover from binge eating and eating disorders.
Binge Eating and Eating Disorders are Defenses
First, it can be scary to start what you believe to be a journey into the unknown. It’s true that you don’t know where you are going or what you will experience on your healing journey. That’s because your psyche has buried the causes of your anxiety. That's the anxiety that fuels your binge eating cravings and need to act out.
Although you don’t know where you are going, you do know in an unconscious way. Your own psyche will help you gain awareness and strengthen yourself as you progress. But this is something you can’t know in advance. If you commit to your healing journey, you’ll discover this.
Remember, the best defense is one that defends you so well that you don't even know there's something to defend against. In this state of partial oblivion maintained by binge eating, you don't know the nature of your inner personal challenge. You believe your challenge is your disruptive eating patterns and your weight.
I like the introductory photo because it shows you many directions, possibilities and challenges, depending on your choices. It also shows you no established path.
Function of Binge Eating and Eating Disorders
People develop eating disorders for a reason. Binge eating and restricting help a person cope with living when the person has not developed other ways to successfully take care of herself. This coping mechanism often develops in childhood, but it can develop at any age.
Puberty is a time when we see many people begin acting out bulimia or anorexia or a combination of both. But I’ve seen patients whose disorder began in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. Something in the person’s experience overwhelmed their coping ability. To avoid that bewildering and frightening anxiety, they binge, purge, and starve to create a different state of consciousness. They try to find a state of calm or numbness they can bear.
Recovery Time
To look at the time involved in healing, we’d have to look at when the healing began. Often, a person lives with an eating disorder for many years without appreciating that it is a disorder that needs attention. They don’t realize that binge eating or starving is a signal that something they can’t identify is threatening them. In an almost automatic and unconscious way, they binge or purge or starve to escape their experience. They head for a place of increased not knowing.
It takes understanding and courage to consider weakening or giving up an accessible escape route when danger seems to be a constant threat.
A person who binge eats or has a full-blown eating disorder often tries on her own to stop her behaviors. She will use willpower, drugs, high-sensation distracting activities, harsh self-criticism, diet programs, sex, and isolation.
When these efforts do nothing to stop her acting out with food she can plunge into more self-criticism. And so she increases her sense of failure and unworthiness.
When she reaches out to psychotherapy, she may be in near despair. Yet she has a glimmer of hope that the psychotherapy or the particular psychotherapist will have the answers that have eluded her.
Hope is important. Courage to reach out is important. Feeling you are worth saving is important. Committing yourself to the therapy work is important. These are all pre-healing stages. Still, the real healing work has yet to begin.
Binge Eating and Eating Disorder Healing Tasks
Healing has to do with developing a competent, mature and aware sense of self and awareness in the world. It has to do with restarting stalled emotional development so she can take care of herself realistically in the face of simple and complex life challenges.
How long does it take to accomplish the required developmental tasks? A substantial period of time, from a few years to many years, depending on each individual's challenges.
Committing yourself to your own healing is essential
In your genuine healing, you venture into a new awareness. You let go of old safeguards and learn a new way to take care of yourself. You learn to recognize, respect, and learn from the teachings of your own inner life.
This seems to be more challenging as we move further into the 21st century. Seductive promises come at you through all-pervasive media advertising and promotions. Quick solutions are offered. Novel approaches, including spa-like environments, electronic devices, and iPhone monitoring, are a few examples.
Solid recovery requires solid work
Postponing that work lengthens the time between your desire for recovery and recovery. While symptoms of binge eating and eating disorders have much in common in different people, the causes of the disrupted eating vary. The pathway through the person’s mind and emotions that make recovery possible are unique for each person. We don’t all have the same histories or the same strengths and weaknesses of mind, psychology, heart and soul.
Each person can companion herself with an experienced psychotherapist who knows the profound influence binge eating and any eating disorder has on a person’s life. Making the journey together is how recovery emerges.
Recovery is a Process
But please don’t despair at the thought of the time involved. Binge eating and eating disorder recovery is a process. As you move through time and stages of recovery, you reap benefits as you go. Your life improves as you gain more health.
During the healing work, yes, you will need courage to face your fear and pain. But you will also experience joy as you discover the authentic worthwhile you who no longer needs to binge eat or act out with food.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.
She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR, FL, and UT. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder
Appointments are virtual.
For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at
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